So I kept seeing situations where my laptop would just reboot with no warning. I would get a Win8 BSOD telling me about a BAD_POOL problem and then reboot. I pretty consistently saw this about 3 times a week.
I also found that whenever I enabled my LAN port while my Wifi was running, the same BSOD would appear about 95% of the time. Annoying but there were no overall increases in frequency so I again, I just worked around it.
Well, about 10 days ago I got an email from Avanquest that I could upgrade to System Suite 15 for free. I have been using various iterations of SS for about 12 years and that has NEVER happened. Sometimes I would get the, "Be an early purchaser of the next version for 20% off!!!" or whatever. Never got an invitation for a free upgrade.
So I took advantage of the upgrade, and coming out the other side, I pretty quickly realized that they no longer included their own firewall and instead migrated all of my rules to the Win8 firewall. The next thing I realized, after a couple of days was that I no longer had a rebooting system.
I realize that its a little early to claim victory but since Avanquest uninstalled their FW, I have had no issues. This has been true for about a week and is true when I enable and disable my LAN interface while leaving my WiFi connected. I still run into odd behavior from time to time, especially if I leave my running laptop undisturbed for a couple of days, but no BSODs.
I have to assume that they became aware of the FW issue and pretty quietly removed it. There were no obvious notices that they were dumping me into Windows FW. Just blurbs about all of the cool new stuff version 15 would do. I suspected something was up when they didn't charge me anything.
The conspiracy theorist part of me got to thinking that the NSA and Microsoft might work something out so that they would have a backdoor as needed. To help this along, MS would ensure that their OSs would be increasingly unstable with third party FW vendors. So everyone eventually gets dumped into the MS FW and it is a lot easier for gubmint and law enforcement agencies to have a look around.
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